Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Today's post is a bit off-topic but necessary. With HDTV you can get excellent quality broadcasts using a pair of rabbit ears in many places. For some of the fringe areas you will need something a little better. You can go to your local electronics retailer and drop $80 on an HDTV antenna but I have not been very impressed with the two that I have which are, essentially, just amplified rabbit ears. This antenna looks like a pretty simple design and it claims to work pretty well. You may be able to put it in your attic if you don't have a lot of metal in your home's construction.

Even if you do get your local channels via cable or satellite you may want to pursue using an antenna and getting the channels yourself. Most providers are compressing the signals to fit more channels in the same amount of bandwidth, giving you a lower quality picture.